Zohran Mamdani Represents The Democrat Party’s Inevitable Drift Left

posted by Steve McCann at American Thinker 

While the Democrat party mayoral primary in New York is stealing the headlines, those who have watched Marxist-Hegelian hybrid ideology overtake the party since the 1960s could have predicted this outcome.

Democrat voters in New York City have chosen Zohran Mamdani as their mayoral candidate. He is an avowed socialist Islamist who has never held a real job, gratuitously tosses around promises of giving away almost everything for free, has publicly stated his determination to defund the police, campaigned on tax-payer funding of “gender-affirming care,” and who vociferously defends all illegal immigrants, including those convicted of heinous crimes, from deportation.

Mamdani wants to empty the jails in New York, claiming that violence is an artificial construction. His commitment to socialist ideals is informed by his Islamic faith, which includes his refusal to retract or apologize for trafficking in incendiary antisemitic language such as “globalize the intifada” for over a decade in a city with two million Jews, second only to Tel Aviv.

Mamdani is not an outlier among the candidates for public office that an increasingly schizophrenic Democrat party is choosing. Instead, he is the 2025 prototype. A decade ago, he would have been soundly rejected by the rank-and-file Democrat voter.

The primary reason the Democrat party finds itself in its current predicament is due to demographic changes within the party. Gone are the ranks of blue-collar workers and much of the middle class that made up the bulk of the party’s base since the Franklin Roosevelt era.

Since the 1990s, this vital part of the base has been increasingly left behind and ignored as a new demographic group wedded to a hybrid version of Marxism/socialism combined with an oppressed/oppressor paradigm that began to assume a more significant role in the party.

The college-educated and higher-income cohorts of the population, particularly single women, began to shift significantly toward the Democrat party during the 1990s. While smaller in number, their money and influence effectively replaced the dominant old order. It was these demographic groupsthat overwhelmingly voted for Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democrat primary.

These credulous, supposedly well-educated socialist idealists believe that they and their hybrid of socialism and victimology can transform the nation into an idyllic utopia, unlike the socialism that has failed everywhere it has been tried.

This hybrid brand of socialism, or American socialism and the oppressed/oppressor mindset, has become a religion among these deluded true-believers. It dominates their psyches and creates astounding levels of emotional baggage, rendering them unable to reason or construct a coherent thought.

That implacable belief, therefore, necessitates blind allegiance to the Democrat party as it is the only means of defeating their avowed enemy—conservatives and Republicans—which they believe personifies evil by blocking utopia and oppressing America’s victim class. This evil strawman, Democrats believe, is hellbent on transforming the nation into a fictitious dystopian nightmare.

So, how exactly does this American hybrid brand of socialism differ from Marxism/socialism as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels delineated it in 1848?

Marxism/socialism is built upon the foundational tenet of class conflict. The lower or working classes (the proletariat) are inevitably exploited by the upper classes (the bourgeoisie) who must, therefore, be overthrown and a classless society established in which the means of production are collectively owned.

In the 1950s, it became clear to the avowed Marxists within the American left that the class conflict scenario would not succeed in the United States because it had already achieved an essentially classless and egalitarian society. However, contained within the underlying tenets of Marxism/socialism was a concept that could still be successfully exploited.

Karl Marx adopted a concept Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel espoused in 1802. Hegel declared that within all societies, there are two groups of people: the oppressed and the oppressors. For him, struggle was the natural course of action. Marx’s promotion of class conflict outlined in his Communist Manifestowas based on this theory.

Taking its cue from the Civil Rights Movement, the American left, instead of promoting economic class conflict, trotted out Hegel’s concept of societal oppression. Pointing to the plight of blacks in America, leftists claimed that, in the United States, numerous other groups of people were also being unfairly constrained, burdened, or marginalized by social forces that pre-identified oppressors had created.

Concurrent with designating the oppressed was the need to isolate the oppressors (initially, the nation’s founders, capitalism, and conservatives). In due course, Jews, Evangelical Christians, and heterosexual white males were added to the list.

Unsurprisingly, the solution to this rampant oppression is an American hybrid of socialism. This version of socialism maintains a veneer of democracy and capitalism as a one-party oligarchy made up of Marxist indoctrinated “best and brightest” permanently controls the government and the economy while guaranteeing equity for all oppressed factions and retribution against the oppressors.

This unique American marriage of socialism and the oppressed/oppressor paradigm fell on fertile ground among the generations coming of age in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

The Greatest Generation (1901-1927) that experienced the Great Depression and won World War II and the Silent Generation (1928-1945) that experienced the Second World War on the home front and was the driving force behind the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s cast a giant shadow over the Baby Boomer Generation (1946-1964) and their progeny.

A significant segment of the Baby Boomer generation, wallowing in unprecedented peace and prosperity, developed the collective mindset that their lives would only have meaning and purpose if they, too, had national crusades to embrace and promote. This was a mindset that became more religiously passionate as the oppressed/oppressor paradigm swept the country among succeeding generations. The only question was: what would qualify as national crusades?

First, it was vital that the pre-identified oppressors could never be “rehabilitated.” Second, any self-declaration of oppression would suffice to marshal the forces against the oppressors in a never-ending conflict that could only be resolved by instituting American socialism.

Thus, the long litany of the oppressed over the years includes women, racial or ethnic minorities, gays, lesbians, the Palestinians, transgenders, atheists, pedophiles, bisexuals, and most recently, illegal immigrants.

What we’re seeing today—voting for avowed Islamists, irrationally supporting unfettered Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, mindlessly backing Hamas and the Palestinians, rabidly defending mutilating children on the altar of transgenderism, allowing men to participate in women’s sports, promoting abortion up to the moment of birth, adamantly refusing to condemn pedophilia, fanatically resisting deporting criminal illegal immigrants, and becoming unhinged when reacting to anything to do with Donald Trump and Republicans—is all symptomatic of the psychotic oppressed/oppressor mindset that has captured a significant plurality of the electorate.

It is this segment of society that effectively controls the Democrat party and has turned it into a schizophrenic entity that can no longer effectively govern this vast and disparate nation.